In this way, we crossed three firebreaks, each time losing a handful of people to snipers on the left or right, but each time bringing with us the bulk of the column. At one point, the Reds tried to mortar us, but their rounds deflected off the trees before they fell, and burst in the air some distance away. Some of our troops were wounded by this shrapnel, and we had to leave them where they fell, still clutching their guns. At the next firebreak, we cut the Panther’s engine entirely, and in the sudden silence I heard shots from behind us, where the wounded had been left. Whether that was a sniper, or the wounded killing themselves, it was impossible to say.
Finally, we saw the edge of the forest ahead of us: an area of smoke at the end of the forest track, under a clear sky. We did not pause, but accelerated towards it, as we could see Red infantry moving between the trees around us, following our progress. When we broke out of the forest itself, we came onto an area of burned ground, still smouldering, which was strewn with wrecked vehicles and charred bodies. A row of Panzer IVs stood there, blackened with fire, lined up as if on an inspection parade. The corpses of their crews were jammed in the hatches, with ravens perched on their limbs. We steered around this spectacle, believing that the corridor held open by the Twelfth Army was now very close. I estimated that it was one kilometre or so, and on either side we heard sporadic fighting, suggesting that the enemy were pushing into the corridor with every moment that passed.
We aimed towards a gap between low hills, which I believed led to Juterborg, where the Twelfth Army should be. The distance from the burned ground to that gap was barely a kilometre, but the ground was uneven, and the Panther could only proceed at walking pace, with the column stumbling in our wake. We crossed a hundred metres, with the Panther juddering as if it was about to explode, then another hundred, and by now the survivors of our column were breaking into a hobbling, frantic run, drawing on their last reserves of energy and hope to make this final dash.
I saw a group of houses ahead, which I thought might be the outskirts of Juterborg. Artillery began to fall on us: heavy-calibre field guns which lifted great chunks out of the ground and scattered them into dust. These explosions fell to our right, with debris cutting down a few of our people on that side as they ran. Then the Red gunners recalibrated, and the shells fell across our front, making a curtain of explosions that we would have to run through. I dropped down into the turret, hearing the smash of shrapnel and stones against the armour plate. One shell landed close to us – and the pressure wave made the whole Panther flatten and then bounce up as it passed over us. The shockwave moved through the panzer, making blood spurt from my nose and leaving my ears ringing.
I realised that the engine had died, and I could dimly hear the driver trying to start it. I decided that the Panther was probably finished, and told the crew to exit and find shelter before the whole vehicle was turned over by an explosion.
We stumbled out of the panzer, and threw ourselves onto the ground near the houses. Our column was already taking shelter there: the shattered windows and doors revealed huddled groups with their hands over their heads. I glimpsed a group of Soviet infantry too, on the edge of the houses, also seeking cover, caught in the open by their own bombardment.
I saw a house with a basement window at ground level, its shutters hanging open, and I jumped in there. Ducking down into the basement, I found that it was occupied by several small children, girls of six or seven years, and two women. The women had the children huddled to them, and their faces were clenched in fear. The explosions outside made the whole floor lift up, and pieces of masonry were starting to fall from the walls. As bricks fell loose among us, a pair of boots appeared at the foot of the steps, and a man crashed into the refuge, followed by another man. They crouched on the floor, staring at us. They were Russians.
They were young, barely twenty, and they wore thin tunics, backpacks and steel helmets. The red star on their chest pockets glowed bright in the light from the stairs. Each man was holding a cylinder-drum machine pistol.
They looked at me, at the children and women, and then at the flashes of explosions at the top of the stairs. Then they just shrugged, and sat back against the opposite wall, their guns in their hands, not taking their eyes off us.
I could feel the weight of my pistol in my holster. The Reds showed no sign of violence, despite my uniform. One of them grinned at the children and winked, making ‘explosion’ noises in his throat. A shell-burst outside made dust pour from the ceiling. The children flinched and whimpered. This cheerful Russian reached into his pocket, and showed the children a picture of his family. The children looked at it in silence, then they looked at me expectantly. Keen to reassure them, I fumbled out the photo of the unknown young woman in my pocket, and showed it to them. Everybody nodded in approval – the children, the women and the two Russian lads.
Debris was still falling onto us from the explosions.
One of the soldiers took his steel helmet off, reached it out and placed it on the head of one little girl, saying something in Russian. The girl’s head was almost concealed by the green steel helmet. The man leaned back, bareheaded. There was a shell-burst directly in the doorway at the top of the stairs, and debris flew down the steps onto us all. I ducked, covering my head, and threw myself in front of the children. I heard shrapnel smashing down the stairs and hitting the walls around us.
I looked up. The bareheaded Russian man had been hit in the forehead. Where his helmet would have protected him, a long piece of shrapnel projected from the wound. He looked dead. His friend was checking his pulse, feeling for signs of life – and then muttering angrily. His eyes burning, he stared at the child with the green helmet – and reached for his gun.
I shot him twice in the chest, then leaned across and shot him again in the head, while the children screamed. The bodies lay there in front of us, while the shelling went on.
When there appeared to be a lull in the bombardment, I told the women to come with me, to leave that place and join our journey to the West. They refused, preferring to stay in their cellar, whatever the outcome. To save them from more trouble than they already faced, I called to my crew men and we pulled the Russian bodies out of the cellar and left them in a crater some distance away from the houses.
The foot column was slowly reassembling from the shattered buildings, with people emerging in ones and twos. After several attempts, my crew started the Panther again, and we formed up our column and then moved on towards the gap in the hills.
The next troops that we saw were German, and they called to us to keep moving, that the Twelfth Army was directly ahead. These troops were guarding an 88mm gun and a pair of Hetzer destroyers which were dug in to guard the hills, so we believed that they were not defectors. We began to find more troops, dug into foxholes or manning gun emplacements, who told us that the Twelfth Army corridor was still open for us.
With the Panther at walking speed, our ragged, bleeding convoy moved into the corridor itself, and we began to move on towards the West. The corridor was barely three kilometres wide, and on each side there were towers of smoke and constant gun fire, as the German Twelfth Army screens there tried to hold off the Soviet pincers that were seeking to crush the safety zone. Red planes raced overhead – but there was a strong Flak cover here, with 20mm Flak wagons using plentiful ammunition. We saw a Sturmovik shot down, with its wings crumpling as it twisted around on fire, and slammed into one of the hills beside us.
The centre of this corridor was full of targets for the Red Jabos: columns of troops that had made it through the encirclements and the pockets to the East, single panzers such as ours, and a few groups of armour, many horses and hand carts for the civilians. The few farmhouses in this region were burning fiercely, many with improvised cemeteries in their yards instead of vegetable gardens and animal paddocks. One yard contained a T34 upside down in a crater, and another had a complete Stuka panzer-buster aircraft just sitting in its grazing meadow, with its canopy hanging open, surroun
ded by dead cattle with their hooves in the air. Everywhere were foot soldiers or civilians, scavenging as they trudged West, beneath trees whose branches were blackened with incendiary fires.
If some among us had imagined that the Twelfth Army zone would be a place of safety, it became clear that the danger here was still very great.
At one point, the protective screen on our left seemed to give way, and German Twelfth Army infantry began streaming back into the centre zone, in full retreat, adding to the confusion around us. Officers halted them with shots over their heads, and several troops who had thrown their weapons away were shot dead out of hand. Still, the breach in the defences was there, barely a kilometre from us, and the sound of tanks came through between the shell bursts.
From up in the cupola, I saw two of our Stugs emerge from concealment beside the road, and head towards the danger point. The crews of these Stugs were young teenagers, perhaps sixteen years of age, and they must have known that they were going to their deaths. They went with blank faces, their eyes wide with amphetamines and fear.
I traversed my Panther and moved in support of them, and although my vehicle would now only operate in second gear, we travelled a few hundred metres through the trees and scrub between us and the screen of the corridor. We passed a staff car among the bushes, which contained two Wehrmacht Majors, both middle-aged but fit and unwounded, both simply waiting in their fine car for the passage to be secured for them by the sacrifice of the young men. We clipped the car in passing, tearing off a wheel, and we moved to a firing position, from which we could just see the edge of the corridor itself.
The situation out there was desperate. The two Stugs were firing on a phalanx of T34s which were nosing in on a gap in the defences. An 88mm PAK gun was also firing from a bunker, and remnants of our infantry were crouched in slit trenches and craters, clutching Panzerfausts. A group of Volkssturm men, aged in their fifties, marched past us rapidly, Panzerfausts and carbines held ready to help fill the gap. These men were immediately hit by a shell burst, and their bodies were dismembered across the ground. A gang of Hiwis – the Russian collaborators who feared recapture by the Reds more than anything – ran forward and seized the dead men’s guns. These Russian defectors threw themselves into the battle with the reckless courage of men whose death sentence was already passed.
My gunner fired on the leading T34, stopping it dead, and two German troops rushed forward with Panzerfausts to finish it. The rockets tore off the front plate of the Red panzer, while the Red crew were still trying to scramble out of the hatches. The T34 began to explode from inside, with main gun ammunition bursting out of the fractured hull in spirals of smoke and sparks.
My Panther was hit by the other T34s, and a shell split the front edge of our turret, so that I could see daylight between the wall and the roof. Another shell hit our front plate and bounced upward in a spray of debris. I told the gunner to fire all our remaining ammunition – and with those few remaining rounds we hit another T34 which was charging on our 88mm position. We knocked the turret right off that panzer, but the hull kept rolling forward, lurching wildly, until it ploughed into the PAK emplacement and crushed the 88mm crew under its tracks.
On my orders, my Panther began to reverse, with nothing by way of fuel or ammunition left to fight with, as the Stugs and their teenage crews fought on, firing again and again at the ranks of T34s rolling in from the fields beyond. From somewhere, two fresh Panthers came to join the defence: vehicles that seemed to be direct from the factory, in perfect paint and equipment fitted to the hulls. As we reversed away and moved back towards the central zone, we saw many of the Hiwi men, finishing their ammunition, stand up and walk towards the T34s, deliberately exposing themselves to the deadly fire. For the Hiwis, it was better to die like that, quickly and anonymously, than spend the rest of their lives in the Gulag, knowing that, because of their collaboration, their families were sharing that fate too.
The two infantry Majors whose car we had just clipped tried to flag us down, demanding a ride, brandishing their pistols. I was not in the frame of mind to suffer these fools, and so I jumped down from the turret and disarmed them. We checked their car, and found two full cans of gasoline in the back. Two full cans! That was enough for another thirty kilometres. The two officers scowled as we filled our tank, then offered us a box of gold watches if we would accept them as passengers. We took two Panzerfausts from some Volkssturm men rushing past us, and armed the two Majors with these, sending them up to the front line with kicks from our hobnail boots. The Volkssturm assured us that the officers would be a valuable resource, worth a whole platoon of Panthers, and began driving them on with their carbines.
The perimeters of the corridor were shrinking every minute. The Red planes circled overhead, weaving between the Flak, firing into the fleeing columns or unloading fragmentation bombs along our route. These bombs separated in the air into smaller containers of explosives, which scattered wildly over a huge area, exploding in torrents of ball bearings and shrapnel.
I thought that I was immune to the sight of death and injury, but the sights we saw on that final few kilometres were astonishing. A civilian bus, commandeered by staff officers, was bogged down in a rut and hit by a fragmentation burst. The thin sides of the bus were ripped open, and the bodies of the officers inside tumbled out onto the road, the wounded lying untended as the passing foot soldiers stepped over them. A group of political prisoners in their striped pyjama uniforms were being employed to pull wagons full of possessions: suitcases, paintings and furniture, under the command of an SS unit. A Red plane shot up the whole procession, sending the paintings in their gilded frames flying through the air, and knocking down the prisoners along with the SS. The prisoners who survived ran or stumbled off into the trees towards the perimeter, some clutching the guns taken from the dead SS men.
A house we passed had two elderly men strung up on nooses from its shutters, with a sign around their necks:
We showed a white flag to the Red monsters.
The white flag itself was draped around the dead men’s bodies, swaying in the breeze.
A group of armed civilian women had cornered a Russian infantryman inside the corridor, and were asking the passing troops what to do with the man. He stood, bareheaded and sullen, while his fate was discussed. Nobody was interested in him, and the women simply shot him through the head with a pistol, then climbed onto a passing wagon.
A Red fighter plane was hit by Flak high overhead, and the aircraft smashed nose-down into the trees, turning an ancient oak into a blazing torch as high as a church steeple. The pilot came down on a parachute, and became entangled on branches across the road further on. He hung there, ten metres overhead, trying to free himself, the subject of disinterested glances from those trudging past, until somebody shot him through the body.
Metre by metre, we began to leave this zone, entering an area where there were patches of long, narrow meadows shielded by fir trees. In some of these meadows, German aircraft had tried to land, perhaps escaping from the East and finishing their fuel here. One field had an abandoned Focke-Wulf fighter, simply standing in the grass, its engine cowling steaming in the light. In another field, a Junkers 52 plane had crash-landed on its belly, and a man of General rank was kneeling on the ground nearby, retching into the grass.
A few minutes later, beyond the trees, we saw shapes moving in another one of these lush pastures. I could see a glint of metal through the mist, and there was a smell of gasoline in the area. I dismounted from the Panther and went forward with one of the infantry men to see what was happening in there. I expected to see Red tanks manoeuvring into position, or isolated elements of our armour in hiding, sitting out the surrounding battles. Instead, as we crept forwards between the trees, machine pistols in our hands, we saw a sight that few Germans were ever privileged to see.
Through the mist, as the sun burned off the vapour, the glimpses of pale metal turned to a definite outline, which at first was blurred b
y the mist, but then became clear. In a few moments, as the metal object moved across the secluded pasture, both I and the infantrymen with me drew breath and lowered our guns.
The object was an aircraft – of a design that we had seen in the newsreels and soldiers’ magazines, presented to us as the greatest of its type – but surely none of us ever believed that we would see one in person. This was a Messerschmitt 262, the legendary jet-powered Schwalbe or swan, the sleek and beautiful twin-engined creation that was one of our wonder weapons. I was astonished at how big it was – in the newsreels, it seemed so much smaller – and I was astonished too at the crude nature of its construction. Its metal panels were evidently hammered by hand, and their metal skin was unpainted except for the German cross on its fuselage and the swastika on its tail fin.
‘No propellers!’ one of the foot soldiers said to himself. ‘Hier ist wunder! Here’s a miracle!’
The aircraft was balanced on its wheels, which were sinking into the lush turf. It was being dragged by a team of oxen – the simple, wagon-pulling oxen that had been bred in this part of Germany for thousands of years. The oxen were roped together, and the rope was looped around the 262’s undercarriage, and metre by metre those ancient beasts, guided by a farm boy of ten years of age, were dragging the jet plane through the grass towards the safety of the trees.
We common soldiers stood mute at this sight. What did this mean for us, and for Germany? Our wonder weapons existed, they were there in front of our eyes, and they were superbly designed with the greatest science that human kind could summon. But the machine was crudely made, it was uneven, and it was being hauled like a medieval cart on its wheels by a gang of oxen, each animal trailing a cloud of flies from its arse. And it was leaking fuel: splashes of liquid were pouring from its hull, making the whole forest reek.
The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945 Page 13
